"Khitain! You won't believe what I've brought back!"

"Will I want to?" asked Yarmuz Khitain.

The accessioning process, it seemed, had already begun: the entire staff, such as still remained, had turned out to transport Nayila's animals in their boxes through the gate and off toward the receiving building, where they could be installed in holding cages until enough was understood about them to allow their release into one of the open habitat ranges. "Careful!" Nayila bellowed, as two men struggling with a massive container nearly let it fall on its side. "If that animal gets loose, we're all going to be sorry—but you first of all!" Turning to Yarmuz Khitain, he said, "It's a real horror show. Predators—all predators—teeth like knives, claws like razors—I'm damned if I know how I got back here alive. Half a dozen times I thought I was done for, and me not having even recorded any of this for the Register of Souls. What a waste that would have been, what a waste! But here I am. Come—you've got to see these things—!"

A horror show, yes. All morning long, and on deep into the afternoon, Yarmuz Khitain found himself witness to a procession of the impossible and the hideous and the wholly unacceptable: freaks, monsters, ghastly anomalies.

"These were running around on the outskirts of Mazadone," said Nayila, indicating a pair of small furious snarling animals with fiery red eyes and three savagely sharp horns ten inches long rising from their foreheads. Yarmuz Khitain recognized them by their thick reddish fur as haiguses—but never had he seen a haigus with horns, nor any so determinedly vicious. "Nasty little killers," Nayila said. "I watched them run down a poor blave that had gone wild, and kill it in five minutes by leaping up and goring it in the belly. I bagged them while they were feeding, and then this thing came down to finish off the carcass." He pointed to a dark-winged canavong with a sinister black beak and a single glowering eye in the center of its distended forehead: an innocent scavenger mysteriously transformed into a thing out of a nightmare. "Have you ever seen anything so ugly?"

"I would never want to see anything uglier," said Yarmuz Khitain.

"But you will. You will. Uglier, meaner, nastier—just watch what comes out of these crates."

Yarmuz Khitain was not sure he wanted to. He had spent all his life with animals—studying them, learning their ways, caring for them. Loving them, in a real sense of the word. But these—these—

"And then look at this," Nayila went on. "A miniature dhumkar, maybe a tenth the size of the standard model, and fifty times as quick. It isn't content to sit there in the sand and poke around with its snout in search of its dinner. No, it's an evil little fast-moving thing that comes right after you, and would sooner chew your foot off at the ankle than breathe. Or this: a manculain, wouldn't you say?"